Chapter 20
By the time Lotta was back in Oslo, Mats had adopted a new life as a building contractor.
In return for a hand from some of the guys on site with the cabin, he’d lent a hand with the farmhouse.
He helped strip the rotten wooden slats from the veranda and loaded them onto a boat along with the other building waste ready to take to the mainland.
He laboured for the carpenter, fetching pieces of timber from the materials stored in the clearing to save him time, and helped keep the work area clear of mess.
It was rewarding work, and he felt a huge sense of satisfaction when he fell into bed at night in the cabin, his whole body aching and a smile on his face.
It also made him feel as if he was actively contributing to moving the project along now that there was a genuine risk that he’d run out of cash before his apartment could be sold.
Staying on the island had its advantages, but after a few days without access to a shower, he made the trip over to Loddefjord to take advantage of the facilities at Ida’s.
‘You could have bathed in the fjord,’ Ida said.
He rolled his eyes because she knew it was far too cold even in June and no match for a hot shower, especially when he’d been working hard every day.
‘How’s it going looking through the stuff from the house?
’ He knew Anders and Becca had helped with sorting out the easier things, like furniture, but there was a lot of paperwork that needing sifting though carefully, not only because it was family history, but some of it might relate to the history of the island itself.
‘There are a couple of things for you to look at on the side,’ she said, waving her hand at the sideboard in the kitchen. ‘Go and shower first, you stink.’
He went upstairs chuckling. He loved the fact he’d worked hard enough to stink. And he loved annoying Ida.
The shower, while no match for the one in his apartment in Oslo, was welcome.
The water was hot and it felt good to be clean.
His hair had been full of dust to the point where he could no longer run his fingers through it, which reminded him he’d need to bring the bedsheets from the cabin back here to be washed before Lotta came to the island again.
He went downstairs in clean tracksuit bottoms and a sweatshirt, his dirty clothes in his arms, put them in the washer and then picked up the papers Ida had pointed out.
The first was an old map of the island, hand-drawn, with no sign of the farmhouse or the other buildings on there.
Perhaps from before anyone had lived there, but it had the word Strandg?rden, literally, the Shore Farm, written on it.
It would be good to frame and display somewhere.
The next was an old piece of paper; at first glance, it looked like a letter, but it was torn in half lengthwise.
The words on the half in his hand were literally half a letter, so it was difficult to get the gist of what it was about.
But at the bottom were two signatures: a Larsen, most likely Mats’ grandfather, and an Olsen. It was dated 14th April 1951.
‘Have you seen this?’ he asked his sister who was sitting at the kitchen table working at her laptop.
‘Yes. That’s why I kept it.’
‘I can’t understand what it’s about.’
She turned to him. ‘I think it’s to do with an area of the farm.
It is hard to tell but an agreement was made over some land and the other person who signed that piece of paper either owns some of the farm land or gave some of the farm land.
Presumably that person had the matching half of that document. ’
‘That’s pretty cool,’ said Mats.
‘It might turn out someone owns some of your land,’ said Ida. ‘Not that cool.’
‘What are the chances now of anyone turning up with this? It’s a gentleman’s agreement from decades ago.
It’s probably not even legal. Olsen is such a common name.
It’d be hard to track down who this is, even if I could read the first part of the signature.
’ It seemed unlikely that it meant anything now but it was an interesting artefact to have found.
While Ida finished her work for the day, Mats cooked dinner for them. He made a pot of hearty lentil and bean stew and roasted various vegetables he found in the fridge to go with it. He poured a glass of wine for each of them as they sat down to eat.
‘When is Lotta back?’
‘Early next week. She’s coming with someone from Snug head office but after that she’s hoping to come out here for a couple of days. I’m not sure we can stay at the cabin though. It’s pretty chaotic over there now.’
‘What’s going to happen once she’s not working on this Oslo project with them? Will she be going to other places to do the same thing?’
Mats had his mouth full, so shook his head. ‘It’s because it’s the first one. When it rolls out to other stores, they’ll follow the process Lotta’s established by themselves. She’ll create the content for them, but she’ll do it all from London.’
‘Where does that leave you?’ Ida put her fork down and Mats braced himself. ‘You’re cutting yourself off, Mats. Being on the island is surely the end for you and Lotta. Have you discussed it?’
He wanted to tell Ida that it was none of her business, but he knew that wasn’t fair. He’d want to feel able to voice concerns to her if things were the other way around. It came from a place of love, even if it presented as interfering.
‘Not in any detail. She knows I’m tied to the project, to living here, at least for the next few years. If I didn’t have the island, I’d move to London like a shot.’
Ida looked surprised. ‘Really? I thought you wanted to get out of the rat race, not do it in a different place.’
‘It would have been worth the compromise to be with Lotta.’
‘You don’t think she wants to move here?’
‘I don’t think she doesn’t want to.’ He laughed, and Ida did too.
‘I think she could probably work from anywhere with a good enough internet connection, but it has to be her decision. I get the feeling that what she has is new for her and hard-won. She’s careful about committing to any specifics.
’ And she was getting more careful, he was noticing.
‘Can you live with not knowing what the plan is?’ Ida, like the rest of his family, knew that he always had a plan, a strategy, whatever he was doing.
‘For now,’ he said, nodding.
‘Because she’s worth it?’
‘She’s everything, Ida.’
They looked at each other over the dinner table, and he felt close to his sister in a way he didn’t often. They were the oldest siblings, and neither of them had had a serious relationship to speak of. It was common ground for them when not much else was.
‘It’ll happen for you when you least expect it,’ he said, trying to make light of it by shovelling more food in his mouth at the same time.
‘Not likely. My standards are far too high.’
He grinned. ‘Knut is newly single.’
‘I’m not going to date someone who shows everyone his arse on a daily basis,’ she said. ‘And he’s not even a builder. It doesn’t seem to matter that it’s the middle of winter, that man never tucks his shirt into his trousers. No one needs to see that.’
Mats laughed. He’d guessed Ida would react like that. The same way she reacted to every suggestion, whoever made it and whoever it was about. Obviously not always using the builder’s bum excuse.
‘Well, if I can find someone, there’s definitely someone for you.’
‘Oh please. You’re a catch. Rich, good-looking apparently, and crying out to be tied down by a good woman. What have I got to offer? I’m living in my parents’ house alone most of the time and I never meet anyone because all my work is virtual.’
It crossed Mats’ mind to point out that she didn’t need to be living in this house. If Ida was ready to let go, it would be the catalyst they all needed to start thinking about selling the place.
‘Where would you live in an ideal world?’
Ida had drunk enough wine to soften her prickles and she leant her elbow on the table and looked up at the ceiling. ‘I’m not sure. Maybe Troms?, somewhere further north. Somewhere…’
‘Colder? More remote?’
She laughed. ‘I was going to say somewhere where nobody knows me. Somewhere where I could reinvent myself.’
‘Copycat.’
‘This is a reinvention for you?’ Her eyes glistened as she poked fun at him. He loved this side of Ida but no one got to see it very often.
‘Yes. Building on the island, well, helping to, brings a whole new meaning to it all. It feels like I’m really doing it with my bare hands.’
‘I know we were all dead against you keeping the island but I can see how happy you are. Although, is that because of the island or because of Lotta?’
‘It’s Lotta for sure.’
Lotta had insisted he shouldn’t come back to Oslo to meet her, but then she messaged him asking if he’d like to be her plus one for a party to launch the Oslo campaign. It was on Thursday night before her colleague Clemmie headed back to London on Friday and Lotta would head to Bergen.
He said yes, excited about getting a glimpse into her world.
It had been hard staying away, knowing she was staying at his apartment, but he respected her request, which he knew was based on the fact she’d be with Clemmie almost all the time.
He was starting to realise that she needed space when she was busy with work and he didn’t want to interrupt her flow.
But being invited to the party told him Lotta was still thinking about him and that made him feel better.
He made plans to fly to Oslo on Thursday and spent the days before concentrating on getting as much of the cabin extension done as he could.
It wasn’t finished, not by a long way, but the walls of the new part were finished and the floor was down.
The only thing missing was windows and the new roof that would be fitted, and he needed to cut a hole in the existing wall of the cabin to join it all together.
The cabin extension had made him think hard about how to make the next phase of the project work.
It was all very well to plan on renovating all the cabins in the woods — there were around twenty — but none of them could have indoor plumbing in the way the main house did.
The most straightforward option to avoid having to empty the septic tank too often would be for each of the cabins to have a Cinderella toilet.
The Larsen family owned a holiday cabin in Voss, a town famous for winter sports, and that had one.
They were commonly used in off-grid cabins and incinerated the waste effectively.
Showers would have to be provided in a shower block, which wasn’t perhaps the luxury feel he was going for, but he could get Becca on the case to make the best of it.
The island already had electricity thanks to his grandfather investing in an undersea connection from the mainland in the seventies, so they could generate hot water for a shower block and eventually have electricity running to all the cabins. Only the wastewater was an issue.
The toilet for their cabin, which he was now using as a guinea pig for the rest of them, had arrived the day before.
Since there was no electricity running to their cabin yet, he’d opted for the version that ran on LPG — liquid gas — thinking he could upgrade it later on.
The next time Lotta came to the island, he wanted her to see that he had indeed made her an ensuite.
He took the boat back to Ida’s and locked the boathouse, then went into the house and showered before packing his bag and heading to the airport.
It felt strange going back to Oslo knowing that Lotta was there waiting for him, but his job wasn’t.
For so long it had been the only reason for him to be in Oslo, and heading back knowing that wasn’t the case anymore was strange.
He was glad he’d listened to Lotta and spent the past two weeks in Loddefjord because he hadn’t thought about work much at all.
But leaving Bergen to go back to Oslo was so ingrained in him, it brought back how he had felt on that last day, although he didn’t feel as sad about it anymore.
Hanne had messaged him to check he was okay and to let him know that Halvorsen & Bryne had announced the takeover.
The word was that the London meeting Mats had attended instead of Ole was the clincher and that as soon as they’d won that business, the takeover bid began.
And somehow, although Mats had no idea how, Ole had got a new job elsewhere and used that to negotiate his position with the acquiring bank, behind everyone’s backs.
He was a pariah, Hanne said. A very rich one.
It made Mats feel better knowing that his dismissal that day had been down to Ole, ultimately, rather than any larger-scale disloyalty from the bank itself.
And he still had to keep reminding himself that the outcome of it all was no different to what he’d wanted anyway, albeit it had happened more quickly than he’d have liked.
So he sat on the train from Oslo airport into the city centre, having not flown business class for the first time in a long time, feeling pretty contented. He couldn’t wait to see Lotta and take her out for the evening.